In the coming year, we’re going to see an increase in both the amount of malware using multiple techniques and the number and quality of available techniques.

Ransomware and Cryptominers will merge into more lucrative threats

Ransomware is wreaking havoc for several years now and while we see a decrease in numbers in favor of Cryptominers, we’re going to start seeing a new type of threat that combines the two to maximize the revenues from each infection. Considering that both threats rely heavily on cryptography to gain money (differing mainly in the way they generate revenue), it could be profitable for malware authors to continue utilizing the device’s resources from one functionality to the other to maximize revenue.

This year we’re going to see the trend evolving further as exploit kits and malware-as-a-service will offer malicious, easy to use ML/AI capabilities to allow creating evasive malware even more easily and more quickly to novice and unsavvy threat actors as well, and not just the advanced ones.